Lynne Truss is the British author of a book with the
improbable title of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. If it sounds familiar, that’s because
the book’s been around since 2002. She's a self-professed stickler for proper punctuation, who obsesses over misplaced commas, and toys with the idea of forming a party of vigilantes to remove superfluous apostrophes from green grocers' signs and movie marquees.

Who would have guessed then -- or even now -- that a book
whose subject is punctuation and the abuses it suffers in contemporary England would
be so entertaining? Not most of us, and not the author either. But it’s become
a best seller with over three million copies in print.

Does a book that reviews the when and where of placing
dashes, hyphens, colons, apostrophes and semicolons, sound boring?

Trust me,
it’s not. I hung on every word and re-read some sentences for the sheer
pleasure of savoring the style and content. Call me crazy, but first listen to Ms
Truss talking about the exclamation mark.

Ever since it came along, grammarians have warned us to be
wary of the exclamation mark, mainly because even when we try to muffle it with
brackets (!), it still shouts, flashes like neon, and jumps up and down. In the
family of punctuation, where the full stop (what we call the period in this
country) is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practices
the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit
brother who gets over-excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.

Or what she has to say about the two ways a Biblical quote
is punctuated:

Now, huge doctrinal differences hang on the placing of this
comma. The first version, which is how Protestants interpret the passage (Luke
xxiii, 43) lightly skips over the whole business of Purgatory and takes the
crucified thief straight to heaven with Our Lord. The second promises Paradise at some later date (to be confirmed, as it were)
and leaves Purgatory nicely in the picture for the Catholics, who believe in
it.

In this sample, she provides proof of the power that punctuation
holds, and how it can change the meaning of a simple sentence:

A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing.

While Ms Truss is a stickler for punctuation, she is not a
strict grammar snob. She’s not averse to breaking the rules of good writing for
the sake of clarity. So, relax. She’s not going to hound you about using the
Queen’s English, or sticking to obsolete restrictions from the last
century.

Although I learned some new rules and tips about how
punctuating properly can enhance the clarity and rhythm of my writing, there’s
not much I can do about my envy of Ms Truss’s writing talent. There is no
way I could train myself to write with such acerbic wit, such frisky spirit, such off-the-wall
vocabulary.

The Wrap:Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a brisk read, casual, personal,
funny, and spiced with just enough historical trivia and literary quotes to
make it meaty.

If you are a writer (and if you blog, you are) and you haven’t
put your hands on Eats, Shoots & Leaves yet, please add it to your must-read
list. My local library had two copies of it -– always a good sign that it’s a book
worth reading.

Even if it doesn’t change the way you punctuate, you’ll have
spent a few hours (it’s only 200 cute pages) in the company of a delightful
individual.